Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

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Your preference for FreeBSD has nothing to do with the early development of Net/2 BSD, its license and the rise of Linux.

Development of BSD was effectively not accessible to the outside world, being a closed playground for the developers at Berkeley. And to get an official version on disk, it also had a pretty steep price.

Even now the various BSD distributions are very rigidly controlled. Yes, they adhere to certain quality standards, but they've also turned off developers from contributing.

BSD is and has been developed in a centralized model, being the Cathedral, whereas Linux's development has been historically very decentralized, being the metaphorical Bazaar. You may like the Cathedral model, MacOS and Windows are developed like that, however in my opinion such a model only works with companies with plenty of resources to spare.

I dont care about the "model". I only care about code quality and stability on critical tasks. And currently the distributions are becoming more and more chaotic, I think this will bite back, you can try and use some whatever the name paradigms but at the end development is hard and not made only from fun problems to solve, there are lots of annoying and pesky tasks that need to be done. And here the system where everyone is mostly doing what is fun for them has huge disadvantage.

But never mind, time will tell.

> And here the system where everyone is mostly doing what is fun for them has huge disadvantage.

A lot of critical Linux contributors are paid for their work. That's why understanding the model of development is important: they're not doing this for fun, whatever that means.

The world does not revolve around you. Regardless of your personal preferences, the Linux development model was an important part of its success.

With apologism you are only hurting Linux. With criticism you would be helping it, but looks like that the football match mentality is winning at the end. Have a nice PR session, i am quitting, have it your way. You won. How cool, right? Right? ;)

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

Thank you for this link, really a nice reading.

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